A Look Inside the Book: Present Yourself Introduction
This is an excerpt from the Present Yourself book by Danielle Barnes and Christina Wodtke, with contributions from 11 brilliant women and non-binary speakers. Learn more about the book and purchase your copy here.
My journey with public speaking has had a lot of ups and downs. I was president of the debate club in high school, but as I tried to enter more academic and professional circles later in my career, my confidence tanked. I couldn’t find my place. I felt like my ideas didn’t matter. (In fact, at my first academic conference, someone with a lot more power/influence than me told me just that.) It got to a point where any sort of presentation caused a lot of agitation for me (and thanks to smart watches, I knew exactly how much my heart rate was spiking).
I was so grateful to have found the [Present Yourself] program and community. To connect with more people like me, to know that we’re in a vicious cycle of not seeing ourselves represented in speakers (and so we don’t feel like we have a place in speaking publicly), and to learn that speaking is a skill and a muscle that you can train (and not something you either do or don’t have), are some of the most empowering experiences I’ve had in my career.
The advice is amazing and actionable. The process works.
—Thea Hogarth, Assoc. Director of User Research
Hello, and welcome! We’re Danielle and Christina and we’re here to help you find your speaking voice and learn how to use it with confidence, whether that be in a workplace meeting or on stage in front of a sea of strangers. We love Thea’s story because it’s both painfully relatable and indicative of why we wrote this book.
We know our framework is effective because we’ve taught it to hundreds of people—but that’s just one reason why this book is different from the dozens of others on public speaking that are available today. Here’s our secret sauce: we don’t offer a one-size-fits-all formula.
A lot of public speaking advice has been centered on a specific way of doing things, trying to teach folks “how to be a speaker” (often code for acting like a cis, straight, white man) rather than how to communicate effectively while showing up in a way that feels authentic to them as individuals. With this book, you’ll learn how to blaze your own path, creating a speaking style that aligns with who you are and the message you want to convey.
Here’s what we believe:
There’s no one right way to approach public speaking. We’ve heard inspiring presentations from individuals who are loud and individuals who are quiet. We’ve been engaged by presenters who speak off the cuff and presenters who read from a script. We’ve known speakers who need to be alone before a big presentation and speakers who warm up by talking to people in the audience before they go on. All of these approaches are “right,” because they work for the people who are using them.
New voices need to be heard. The people we see leading our meetings and speaking on conference stages are the people we view as leaders. Their ideas shape our thinking. Everyone has a unique story to share, but we especially need to hear from those we don’t hear from enough—because their leadership is just as important.
Public speaking isn’t a level playing field. Being a part of one (or many) groups that have been historically marginalized impacts speakers both in how they are perceived and how much others will invest in them. It’s important to be honest about these biases and barriers—and to do our part in offsetting them. By providing access to inclusive techniques and resources, we can empower these groups in environments where their ideas are not so easily heard.
Presenters only improve with practice. Presenters can read all they want about public speaking, but they’ll only improve if they take initiative and actually start speaking. Practice is why we run Present Yourself as a workshop, and it’s also why we—in this book—provide exercises that presenters can put into practice right away.
Community builds resilience. We dedicated a whole chapter to building a community of support, because speakers shouldn’t have to approach sharing their ideas alone. We make each other better, so we encourage speakers to bring others into their process early and often.
Our goal with this book is to 1) inspire more individuals to speak and 2) create space for more and different voices to be heard. This goal was also the origin of Women Talk Design, a platform founded by co-author Christina Wodtke and led by co-author and CEO Danielle Barnes.
Christina and Danielle met long ago at a startup and have been friends ever since, but for the purposes of this book, our story begins in 2013.
Christina had spent more than a decade working in design and product development, authoring four books, leading teams at Zynga, Myspace, LinkedIn, and Yahoo, and speaking at dozens of conferences and organizations around the world. As a speaker, she was tired of seeing all-male panels and conference lineups. She hoped—like many people—that such lineups existed because organizers just didn’t know many women speakers. Starting a little blog called Women Talk Design, Christina aimed to change that.
Years later, two of Christina’s most promising female students didn’t get summer internships, so she raised enough money to hire them as researchers, tasking them with an investigation of the conference space. She wanted to better understand why event stages had so few women. As well as the expected results, such as implicit bias, her students discovered that women often felt underqualified to speak.
With this information in hand, Christina began to brainstorm. She wanted to transform her blog into an initiative that would help women feel comfortable on stage—but she couldn’t lead this initiative, as she was busy giving workshops and talks when she wasn’t teaching at Stanford and raising a teenager. So, she turned to Danielle.
Danielle had already led some big projects, founding Austin Design Week and launching campuses for General Assembly (a tech education company) in San Francisco and Austin. However, she had never been a CEO, which was an oversight in Christina’s opinion. Danielle took on the challenge, and together they designed the first Present Yourself workshop with help from a few others, including book contributors Eleanor Mason Reinholdt, Alexis Wong, and Alla Weinberg. Under Danielle’s direction, the mandate expanded to non-binary folks and others with marginalized identities—from all industries. She created a business model that uses money from corporate training (open to employees of all genders) to fund free and low-cost programs for the community, as well as scholarships for those who can’t afford speaker training.
The rest is history.
We’ve had marketers, entrepreneurs, therapists, politicians, scientists, and engineers take the Present Yourself program and join the WTD community. And, as two white, US-born, native-English-speaking women, we’ve made it our priority to bring in—and pay—speakers of various intersecting identities for everyone to learn from. This book shares in that priority; we invited eleven contributors from varying fields and identities to tell their stories and share their advice. Our hope is that you will be able to see yourself in (and learn from) their lived experiences.
As with many other aspects of life, public speaking has never been a level playing field. That said, just about anyone can benefit from the tools and processes that lie a couple page-turns ahead—no matter the speaking situation, and no matter who you are. Our hope is that whoever picks up this book will finish it feeling more confident, less alone, and newly motivated to lift others’ voices as they rise.
We’ll start by talking about why you should share your ideas and how you can tap into your motivation as you work your way through the chapters. We’ll discuss how to bring other people into your process, then dive into the nuts and bolts of clarifying your ideas—structuring them in a way that suits the ear and eye, across an array of mediums. We’ll also dedicate time to calming your nerves before you present and to dealing with the unexpected.
Finally, we’ll highlight a few of the biases and challenges you might face if you’re someone from a historically marginalized background (because it’s not you, and it’s not in your head, either). Even if you don’t come from such a background, we hope you’ll use this information to reflect on how you show up for and listen to others who have faced discrimination. While everyone needs to participate in changing the systems that hold some of us back, we won’t wait for change to start using our voices.
At the end of each chapter, you’ll find a Now Try section. While it can feel helpful to read advice and tactics for effective communication, the truth is that you improve through practice. These sections invite you to take what you’ve learned and put it to work. And not just at work. We’ve heard from past program participants that these tools can help with many aspects of communication, everywhere in life.
Although this book will focus on creating presentations in both work and conference settings, it’ll also touch on topics far beyond that.
Use this book as a step-by-step guide, or as a reference. Flip through the chapters to find what’s most useful to you in a given moment and come back to the tools again and again.
As you go through this book, stop looking for “the right way” to speak, and instead start to construct “your own way”—something that works for and feels like you.
Your voice needs to be heard. And we can’t wait to hear what you’ll share.
